Author and narrator Katy Butler’s calming tone softens her insights on reclaiming control over one’s life and death. Butler is straightforward in her belief that modern medicine eliminates the customs, rituals, and recognition of this rite of passage. She believes that the desire to prolong life has created secrecy, fear, and shame around dying. Her message that today’s medical system postpones death and disregards the integrity that death and dying once had is sobering, however. As narrator, her sincerity is comforting and encouraging, and her soothing voice and practical advice scale back the daunting journey of preparing and managing for a peaceful and humane death process in this era of high-tech medicine. This is indispensable information delivered with compassion and frankness. M.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
Narrated by Katy Butler
Katy ButlerUnabridged — 7 hours, 38 minutes
The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life
Narrated by Katy Butler
Katy ButlerUnabridged — 7 hours, 38 minutes
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Overview
An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven's Door.
In the mid-1400s, an unnamed Catholic monk composed a popular self-help book called Ars Moriendi, or The Art of Dying. Written in Latin, this medieval death manual taught people how to navigate the trials of the deathbed using simple rituals of repentance, reassurance, and letting go.
Best-selling author and award-winning journalist Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying. Butler has lectured at medical schools and spoken with community and caregiving organizations across the country. Here she reveals what she has learned about dying in America today — and how to have a better end of life.
We are coping with a medical system in disarray in its approach to people who are aging, dying, or chronically ill. Butler argues it's not about living as long as possible, it's about living as well as possible. Not only does our current system poorly serve our medical needs, it also crowds out any sense of the sacred. It's time to restore a sense of ¿honor¿, and through exploring the stages of later life, sharing “good death” stories, as well as offering practical takeaways, The Art of Dying Well illuminates a path to a better end of life.
Editorial Reviews
12/17/2018
Journalist Butler offers a straightforward, well-organized, nondepressing guide to managing the run-up to one’s inevitable demise. Each chapter features different end-of-life–related themes and exemplary real-world anecdotes of how people cope with different age-related difficulties, with an emphasis on the mental as well as physical aspects of coping with old age and the associated infirmities. Butler’s advice is commonsensical without being platitudinous or folksy. One point she particularly stresses is the wisdom of staying away from hospitals when possible. She uses vivid terms to illustrate her points, such as “House of Cards” to refer to a fragile state of health, “common in people in their nineties or in the mid to later stages of dementia.” No doubt to the delight of nonagenarians everywhere, Butler’s advice to them is not cautionary but rather to indulge in pleasurable activities as much as possible: what she calls “enjoying your red velvet cake.” Free of platitudes, Butler’s voice makes the most intimidating of processes—that of dying—come across as approachable. Her reasonable, down-to-earth tone makes for an effective preparatory guide to the permanent holiday upon which everyone eventually embarks. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Feb.)
"[A] deeply felt book...[Butler] is both thoughtful and passionate about the hard questions she raises — questions that most of us will at some point have to consider. Given our rapidly aging population, the timing of this tough and important book could not be better."
"Katy Butler's new book—brave, frank, poignant, and loving—will encourage the conversation we, as a society, desperately need to have about better ways of dying. From her own closely-examined personal experience, she fearlessly poses the difficult questions that sooner or later will face us all.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become."
Katy Butler’s science background and her gift for metaphor make her a wonderfully engaging storyteller, even as she depicts one of our saddest but most common experiences: that of a slow death in an American hospital. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a terrible, beautiful book that offers the information we need to navigate the complicated world of procedure and technology-driven health care.
This is some of the most important material I have read in years, and so beautifully written. It is riveting, and even with parents long gone, I found it very hard to put down. ... I am deeply grateful for its truth, wisdom, and gorgeous stories—some heartbreaking, some life-giving, some both at the same time. Butler is an amazing and generous writer. This book will change you, and, I hope, our society."
"Butler’s advice is neither formulaic nor derived from pamphlets...[it] is useful, and her challenge of our culture of denial about death necessary...Knocking on Heaven’s Door [is] a book those caring for dying parents will want to read and reread. [It] will help those many of us who have tended or will tend dying parents to accept the beauty of our imperfect caregiving."
Butler’s factual, no-nonsense tone is surprisingly comforting, as are her stories of how ordinary folks confronted difficult medical decisions... Her thoughtful book belongs on the same shelf as Atul Gawande’s best-selling Being Mortal and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes.”
—The Washington Post
“A better roadmap to the end... combines medical, practical, and spiritual guidance.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
"A commonsense path to define what a 'good' death looks like."
—USA Today
“An empowering guide that clearly outlines the steps necessary to avoid a chaotic end in an emergency room and to prepare for a beautiful death without fear.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Straightforward, well-organized, nondepressing... Free of platitudes, Butler’s voice makes the most intimidating of processes—that of dying—come across as approachable. Her reasonable, down-to-earth tone makes for an effective preparatory guide.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This book is filled with deep knowledge and many interesting experiences. It is a guide for staying as healthy and happy as possible while aging, and also shows how important it is to be medically informed and know our rights in the communities where we live, in order to stay in charge of our lives and therefore less afraid of the future. Katy Butler has written a very honest book. I just wish I had read it ten years ago. You can do it now!”
—Margareta Magnusson, author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning
“The Art of Dying Well is a guide to just that: how to face the inevitable in an artful way. Katy Butler has clear eyes and speaks plainly about complicated decisions. This book is chock-full of good ideas.”
—Sallie Tisdale, author of Advice for Future Corpses
“In plain English and with plenty of true stories to illustrate her advice, Katy Butler provides a brilliant map for living well through old age and getting from the health system what you want and need, while avoiding what you don't. Armed with this superb book, you can take back control of how you live before you die.”
—Diane E. Meier, MD, Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care
“No, you won’t survive your death, but you can live until the very last moment without the pain and humiliation that inevitably accompany an over-medicalized dying process. Katy Butler shows how, and I am profoundly grateful to her for doing so.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes
“This is a book to devour, discuss, dog-ear, and then revisit as the years pass. Covering matters medical, practical, financial and spiritual – and, beautifully, their intersection – Katy Butler gives wise counsel for the final decades of our ‘wild and precious’ lives. A crucial addition to the bookshelves of those seeking agency, comfort and meaning, The Art of Dying Well is not only about dying. It’s about living intentionally and in community.”
—Lucy Kalanithi, MD, FACP, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine
“The Art of Dying Well is the best guidebook I know of for navigating the later stages of life. Katy Butler’s counsel is simple and practical, but the impact of this book is profound. A remarkable feat.”
—Ira Byock, MD, author of Dying Well and The Best Care Possible, Active Emeritus Professor of Medicine, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Praise for Katy Butler and Knocking on Heaven's Door
"[Knocking on Heaven's Door is] a triumph, distinguished by the beauty of Ms. Butler's prose and her saber-sharp indictment of certain medical habits. [Butler offers an] articulate challenge to the medical profession: to reconsider its reflexive postponement of death long after lifesaving acts cease to be anything but pure brutality."
"This is the most important book you and I can read. It is not just about dying, it is about life, our political and medical system, and how to face and address the profound ethical and personal issues that we encounter as we care for those facing dying and death. [This book's] tenderness, beauty, and heart-breaking honesty matches the stunning data on dying in the West. A splendid and compassionate endeavor."
"Shimmer[s] with grace, lucid intelligence, and solace."
"Knocking on Heaven's Door is more than just a guide to dying, or a personal story of a difficult death: It is a lyrical meditation on death written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity."
"This braid of a book...examines the battle between death and the imperatives of modern medicine. Impeccably reported, Knocking on Heaven's Door grapples with how we need to protect our loved ones and ourselves."
This is a book so honest, so insightful and so achingly beautiful that its poetic essence transcends even the anguished story that it tells. Katy Butler’s perceptive intellect has probed deeply, and seen into the many troubling aspects of our nation’s inability to deal with the reality of dying in the 21st century: emotional, spiritual, medical, financial, social, historical and even political. And yet, though such valuable insights are presented with a journalist’s clear eye, they are so skillfully woven into the narrative of her beloved parents’ deaths that every sentence seems to come from the very wellspring of the human spirit that is in her."
"This beautifully written and well researched book will take you deep into the unexplored heart of aging and medical care in America today. With courage, unrelenting honesty, and deepest compassion, ... Knocking on Heaven’s Door makes it clear that until care of the soul, families, and communities become central to our medical approaches, true quality of care for elders will not be achieved."
"Knocking on Heaven's Door is more than just a guide to dying, or a personal story of a difficult death: It is a lyrical meditation on death written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity."
09/01/2018
Author of the New York Times best-selling Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, Butler again explores how we die in contemporary times, especially America, claiming that we need better rituals to ease the transition between life and death.
Author and narrator Katy Butler’s calming tone softens her insights on reclaiming control over one’s life and death. Butler is straightforward in her belief that modern medicine eliminates the customs, rituals, and recognition of this rite of passage. She believes that the desire to prolong life has created secrecy, fear, and shame around dying. Her message that today’s medical system postpones death and disregards the integrity that death and dying once had is sobering, however. As narrator, her sincerity is comforting and encouraging, and her soothing voice and practical advice scale back the daunting journey of preparing and managing for a peaceful and humane death process in this era of high-tech medicine. This is indispensable information delivered with compassion and frankness. M.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170810017 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,147,887 |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Preparing for a Good End of Life
The River Grows Wider
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death.... The best way to overcome it is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. [Those] who can see life in this way will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things [they care] for will continue.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
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